Embodiments of the present invention relate in general to the internet protocol mobility communications. More particularly, the invention provides a method and system for facilitating update and retrieval of Mobile Internet Protocol version 6 (MIPv6) state information to mobile nodes in a specified node group. Merely by way of example, the invention has been applied to develop a MIPv6 mobility architecture that can be used for various client node platforms including, but not limited to, peer-to-peer communication applications in mobile environment. But it would be recognized that the invention can be applied for a mobile node to query for the state information of any random node on the Internet and has a much broader range of applicability.
Mobile IPv6 is a network layer IP standard used by electronic devices to exchange data across a packet-switched inter-network. Mobile IPv6 allows an IPv6 node to be mobile-to arbitrarily change its location on an IPv6 network—and still maintain existing connections. This is achieved by installing a MIPv6 home agent (HA) which is capable of maintaining information about all mobile node bindings in a binding cache. Each mobile node, i.e. any mobile device that is IP supported including laptop computer, handheld computer, car computer, cell phone, PDA, etc. or even a router, is identified by its home address although it may be connecting to through another network. When connecting through a foreign network, a mobile node sends its location information to a HA, which intercepts packets intended for the node and tunnels them to the current location. Also the mobile nodes maintain information about correspondent nodes in a binding update list.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Mobile IP working group has developed several standards or proposed standards to address these needs, including Mobile IPv6. However, The IETF Mobile IPv6 specification lacks support for mobile aware applications to use and interface with the core MIPv6 protocol. For example, mobility applications may require to be aware of Mobile IPv6 state information that is registered with the HA. Conventionally, this information is often only provided to the mobile node when communication is initiated and is often only with that specific mobile node. MIPv6 protocol in general does not support actual retrieval of state information from a mobile node. Thus, a MIPv6 enabled application on one mobile node may not know the presence of a specific group of MIPv6 nodes so that information sharing within the group may not be possible.
From the above, it is seen that an improved technique for a MIPv6 enabled nodes and their respective client applications to discover and retrieve state information of any other Mobile IPv6 nodes in some specified group is desired.